‘Dog the Bounty Hunter’ Was ‘Running From the Truth’ During Health Scare According to Dr. Oz

Dr. Oz is opening up about helping Duane “Dog the Bounty Hunter” Chapman confront his health problems on his show. The Dr. Oz Show host opened up about the reality television personality finding out he had a “life-threatening” condition in which “clots block blood flow,” two weeks after being hospitalized for chest pains.

The Dog’s Most Wanted star’s health scare happened just a few months since he lost his wife Beth Chapman to throat and lung cancer. She was 51 years old.

Oz opened up about helping Dog through finding out about his health scare in a visit to Fox & Friends, where she said the reality star was “running from the truth.”

“And many of us metaphorically do that, but he was literally doing it,” he said, Fox News first reported. “And, I learned after flying to Colorado and taking him by his hand and getting into why he was in the doldrums…[why] he was in a lot of it is because of his beloved wife Beth’s passing.

“He had a broken heart and people do die from a broken heart, but mostly because they give up hope,” he said. “And, she was his North Star.”

The talk show host said helping Chapman learn the power of knowing about his condition helped him turn his life around. Oz said Chapman was experiencing “all the signs and symptoms” of a heart attack and “finally, after numerous efforts, we got the testing, proved what he had, now he’s in treatment.”

“He has completely changed his life. He used to smoke four packs [of cigarettes] a day — it started when he was aged 12,” he told the hosts. Dog is reportedly now down to just one pack a day.

During Chapman’s appearance on the show, the reality star got to check one of his lung scans with the doctor.

“You see how this normal artery here has little white middle part? But this one has a little piece missing out of it. You notice it’s white on the outside but the middle is like an eclipse, real black,” Oz told Chapman. “That’s a piece of blood clot, that is actually inside the arteries of your lungs. That’s called a pulmonary embolism.”

“The problem with these clots is when they block off the arteries, they don’t let any oxygen get to the lungs,” the host continued. “There are plenty of folks who died from these emboli.”

“You’re not going to be here with the heart the way it is right now,” Oz told Chapman back in September. “”Fear of death is normal. I’m surprised you don’t fear death when you’re chasing after convicts. But when you run away from doctors, that means you have to do your own doctoring.”